The ability to act quickly and decisively in today's increasingly competitive marketplace is critical to the success of any organization. As global competitive threats increase, new markets emerge, and new regulatory pressures for financial clarity and accuracy arise, businesses face unprecedented requirements for speed and accuracy in forecasts and plans. The volume of data that is available to organizations is rapidly increasing and frequently overwhelming.
Several new approaches have been created to respond to the new challenges in business performance management: Enterprise planning combines the resources to provide insight into past, current, and future operating performance, enabling managers to spot trends, identify opportunities, and affect outcomes; Monitoring or Scorecarding helps the decision makers to track and analyze key business metrics via scorecards, and provides the direct link to the business intelligence; and Business Intelligence takes the volume of collected and stored data, and turns it into meaningful information that can be used in the day-to-day activities.
Business Intelligence has usually a Reporting component and an Analysis component. Analysis allows end users to interact with multi-dimensional business information and answer ad hoc questions with minimal knowledge of the underlying data sources and structures. Reporting is the process of accessing, formatting, and delivering of stored, collected and processed data.
Reporting is the largest and fastest-growing component of the business intelligence (BI) market. Reporting helps users understand the performance of a business and leads to immediate action on the most recent information. It creates a common context for decision-making.
Reporting provides high-performance engines to merge predefined report templates with large volumes of data to produce, publish and distribute reports to a wide audience of information consumers. Key reporting features for reporting include advanced formatting, multi-pass calculations, bursting, table of contents navigation, on-demand paging, report element security and output to multiple formats (for example, PDF, HTML and Excel).
When a report is generated, it is common to retrieve the data from different databases, aggregate them and display the data in a report. However, data in different databases may be suited for displaying a particular type of data. For example, they are stored as logical header pages for displaying at the header of each page of a report, logical footer pages for displaying at the footer of each page of the report, and details pages for displaying in the middle of a page. A report maybe assembled from one logical header page, one logical details page and one logical footer page. If the logical details page has only one row of data, and a logical page break at the end, the assembled report may have one header, one row of data from the detailed page and a footer. The resulted report output will waste valuable space, on paper or on display.
In addition, same information may exist in different databases, or in different records of the same database, when a report is generated, same information may be presented more than once, for example, sale information may be presented under account and under customer.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved report output of the reporting in business intelligence.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,320,586 describes a computer system with a visual display for data in an interactive split pie chart. The system permits a user to modify the input parameters of the pie chart to dynamically alter the configuration of the chart. An interface is between the computer system and a data storage system to transfer data to be transformed into the graphical rereport output of the pie chart.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,460,031 describes a system for creating and titling reports from a database by using a graphical title bar navigator to create and depict a natural language phrase to query a database and title the resulting report such that the navigator itself becomes the title. A set of parameters embodying the various tables and fields in a traditional database system is provided for selection in a menu by the user. The user selects a first parameter through the navigator. Based on this selection, a further set of parameters is made available, until the specificity of the query has been achieved. Each selection that is made grammatically follows the selection before it such that the navigator depicts a complete sentence in natural language form. The query is communicated from the interface to the database management system which accesses the data. The natural language phrase persists and becomes the title of the report.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,657,647 describes a method in which a main document and referenced frame documents to be rendered by a browser for a display page are parsed by the browser to identify where text and graphics objected are to be located.